Vote ruling likely will haunt Greg Abbott

Updated 5:00 pm, Friday, July 5, 2013

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has pushed hard to implement a Voter ID law, and minority voters may feel he is trying to suppress their vote.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has pushed hard to implement a Voter ID law, and minority voters may feel he is trying to suppress their vote.

Photo: Tony Gutierrez / Associated Press

Image 2 of 2

Robert Brischetto is a research consultant and president of Social Research Services Inc.

Robert Brischetto is a research consultant and president of Social Research Services Inc.

Vote ruling likely will haunt Greg Abbott

1 / 2

Back to Gallery

Attorney General Greg Abbott celebrated the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling disabling Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by announcing that the Texas voter ID law will go into effect immediately.

But the political fallout of the Texas law requiring photo IDs could prove to be more of a liability than an asset to his party and his own bid to be elected governor.

Abbott almost got what he wanted from the Supreme Court. The ruling last month did not declare the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, as he had requested, but it nullified preclearance until Congress crafts a more current formula for determining who is covered under Section 5. That's not likely to happen with this deadlocked Congress.

“Preclearance” of changes in voting rules by the Department of Justice or the D.C. federal court was a powerful enforcement tool to ensure that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination do not erect new barriers to voting for minorities. Texas was one of the nine mostly southern states, in addition to parts of seven other states, covered under Section 5 preclearance.

The high court in its 5-4 ruling found that the formula for determining which jurisdictions would be required to pre-clear voting changes was outdated because it was based in part on voter turnout in the 1970s. But the court left intact other provisions of the Voting Rights Act and minority advocates have signaled their intention to go back into federal court to challenge the Voter ID law and the Republican legislative plan for redistricting in Texas under Section 2 of the act, a more arduous legal route.

Most Popular

The Voter ID law passed by the Legislature in 2011 requires voters to show a driver's license, a concealed handgun license, a passport, a military ID or a citizen certificate with a photo at the polls. It is the kind of second-generation minority voting barrier that preclearance was to guard against.

Minority vote suppression has often been used by the party in power as a political strategy to maintain its advantage at the polls.

Restrictive voting laws were part of a national strategy by GOP political operatives to suppress voter turnout among minorities after it became clear that Barak Obama was elected in 2008 with high turnout rates among those voters.

As expected, the Texas Voter ID law and the one like it in South Carolina did not pass preclearance because its requirements weighed more heavily on minority voters, who were more likely than other voters to be without forms of photo ID.

The Department of Justice probe of the potential impact of the Voter ID law found that as many as 795,955 registered voters in Texas do not have a Texas driver's license and a disproportionately large number are Hispanic. (Hispanics make up 21.8 percent of those registered to vote and 38.2 percent of the registered voters without driver's licenses.)

After spending several million tax dollars investigating voter fraud, Abbott issued 26 indictments, most of which were not voter fraud but violations by persons collecting mail ballots.

But the type of fraud that the voter ID law would address, voter impersonation, was not found.

Clearly the plan to suppress minority votes did not pan out for Republican strategists in the 2012 election. Indeed, it may have had the opposite effect.

Abbott has taken center stage on the Voter ID law that may help to get his party's nomination for governor; but he will have a hard time convincing minority voters that he is not out to suppress their votes in 2014.